Politics

Medium Cool

One rap on Obama is that he’s too aloof and cerebral, that he just can’t “connect.” There’s truth in that observation—but don’t discount the ability of the G.O.P. presidential contenders to make him look like a regular guy.

By Julie Denesha/Getty Images.

The list of President Obama’s potential problems in getting re-elected is almost too long to enumerate: job-approval ratings that hover in the low 40s, a stubbornly stagnant economy, a dysfunctional political culture in Washington that his election was supposed to have changed, and a personality so even-keeled as to make him sometimes seem dead in the roiling waters around him.

But as the Not-Ready-for-Primary-Time Players of the Republican field continue their pre-Iowa and New Hampshire follies, it is worth pausing to ponder another reality. Every incumbent president has enormous built-in political advantages—from the power to make news with his every word to the ability to offer rides on Air Force One to politicians who matter—and this particular president is possessed of a temperament, and a track record, ideally suited to the clutch play.

When Time magazine, citing Ronald Reagan’s famous maxim “How can a president not be an actor?,” recently asked George Clooney how good an actor Obama is, Clooney replied, “If you consider a good actor to be the guy that you want when you’ve got one take left and the sun is setting, then he’s a very good actor, because when his back’s against the wall, he’s always terrific.”

Obama is also something else. As his half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, told me in Hawaii nearly five years ago when I set out to explore his early years, “he’s a very cool customer.” As often as not in the White House, this quality has worked against him, when he’s been seen as inadequately responsive to the plight of a voter in a town-hall meeting, or not enraged enough about the Gulf oil spill or the jobless economic recovery. It has become perhaps the most encrusted trope of political journalism inside the Beltway and out that Obama’s lack of a Clintonesque ability to feel our pain is his signal political flaw. As with all clichés, there is truth in the critique—and Obama doesn’t help himself when he plows his way through parties of his supporters and friends—as I have seen him do—by clasping hands and saying in the same breath, “Gotta go!” People like to feel the guy they like can spend a few moments to like them back from time to time.

But it is also an incontrovertible truth that Obama got where he is—as a mixed-race man who prevailed in a white-majority world; as a dogged second-stringer who won a slot on his varsity basketball team; as a Delphic conciliator who became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and eventually, of the United States—by virtue of this very sangfroid. They may not put it that way in Peoria, but in Marshall McLuhan’s media terms, Obama’s as cool as they come.

“As I imagine it, the angrier Newt gets, the calmer the president will get,” said speechwriter Mark Katz. “Depending on how angry the electorate is, that calmness could be President Obama’s undoing.”

Newt Gingrich, by contrast, is, as my mother used to say, “hotter than the hubs of Hell,” his head seemingly ready to explode at any moment from a surfeit of ideas, good and bad.

“If there are going to be a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates, I think Obama will definitely be Lincoln,” Mark Katz, the veteran Democratic speech-and-joke writer, who is resident scholar at his own Soundbite Institute, told me the other day. “It’s a battle between the self-possessed and the self-assured, the egoless and the egomaniac. I’m sure there was some episode of Star Trek where Spock went head-to-head with James T. Kirk.”

Among the other potential rivals, Mitt Romney seems frantic, metaphorically and physically bouncing from position to position, as if he could persuade reluctant conservatives by the sheer kinetic energy of his efforts. Ron Paul is avuncular, but some of his libertarian views are not. Jon Huntsman has the kind of low-key presentational skills that might actually make him a worthy adversary of the president, but he can’t seem to get any traction with Republican voters and he has paid a price for his apparent lack of grace in running against the man who made him ambassador to China.

“I think, as I imagine it, the angrier Newt gets, the calmer the president will get,” said Katz, who often worked for Bill Clinton. “And depending on how angry the electorate is, that calmness could be President Obama’s undoing. The question will come down to: Is America sane or angry?”

Whatever the real hurdles he faces, Obama remains the man to beat. In 2008, against a John McCain who took his advisers’ counsel not to engage with Obama to such an extreme that he all but refused to look at him in one debate, Obama seemed positively presidential. It just may be that Gingrich and the rest of the Republican field are the one group of challengers who could manage to make this famously aloof and cerebral president look, if not exactly like a regular guy, at least like a “normal” American, as Newt himself might put it.